How to overcome the challenges inherent to cross-disciplinary collaboration: Creating a boundary matrix.



(Illustration: Dave Gray)

 
Some remarkable slow-motion footage:

(Thanks Ask)

 
The three paragraphs on this page at gigaom offer a variety of links leading to some great posts touching on various aspects of generalism and work. As the intro lines state: "'Big-picture thinking and inventiveness are going to be the key to professional success in a new “conceptual age.' In a series of posts over at WebWorkerDaily, Imran Ali has been musing on the type of work that we might be doing in the future, the skills that will be required, and the type of teams we might be working in." (Hat tip to augustdiva!)

Separate but related - work in the conceptual age - is this TED Talk by Dan Pink. He speaks about how to motivate workers and how rewards for task-oriented people need to be one thing and rewards for creative people needs to be another.

 

The Cove. It's a remarkably restrained film in that most of it describes the teamwork, planning, and logistics involved with covertly documenting one of the grisliest activities on earth: Japan's slaughter of dolphins. Not much of the brutal footage is actually shown, and it's obvious that the producers spared us the especially gory bits, but what is seen quite vividly shows the ugliest and cruelest of what humanity can unleash upon another sentient, self-aware mammal.

The Cove centres on an Oceans 11 type team of photographers, ex-military, free divers, props designers, and others assembled by Director Louie Psihoyos and OPS (Oceanic Preservation Society) and their efforts to expose the brutal round-up of dolphins each year in a tiny cove in Taiji, Japan. Its lead character is Ric O'Barry, whose life's mission is to reverse the captivity, trade, and killing of dolphins that came about largely by the popularization of the creatures in his 60s TV series Flipper. Along the way, we see Taiji's and Japan's bureaucratic political shadiness and even self-destruction (they mislabel toxic mercury-soaked dolphin meat as whale meat and distribute it to school lunch programs).

A very powerful and disturbing movie.

 
Apparently NetFlix has a rather enlightened approach to HR and company culture. Exhibit A: this internal 128-slide presentation.

 
An excellent Ad Age article by Al Reis on the often misunderstood key difference between marketing and advertising, and why GM doesn't get it.

I think he's wrong. Advertising at GM is not broken. Marketing is.

Marketing's job is to coordinate all the various disciplines inside a corporation in order to develop the right product, the right price, the right position, the right distribution strategy and the right brand name.

Advertising's job is to position that brand name in the minds of consumers.

Good marketing makes advertising relatively easy. Bad marketing makes advertising difficult, if not impossible.

(Thanks Dave)

 
From the display tables to the "Guru Bar", it's hard not to page through the leaked Powerpoint describing design plans for Microsoft's retail stores as highly imitative of Apple Stores.

Now, check out this excellent Adult Education ("a useless lecture series") talk by Gaylord Fields called "Yeah Yeah ... Uh, No: Exploring the Audiovisual Phenomenon of Beatles-Lookalike Long Playing Albums".

 
One of the trippiest, most wonderfully odd music videos ever...

Tiga "Shoes" from AlexandLiane on Vimeo.

 
It's an odd thing to spit into a vial and send your saliva FedEx across the continent. So it was that curiosity tempted me a few months ago to try out 23andMe's personal genetics test.

Basically, you order a kit online for $399. It arrives a couple weeks later. You spit in the special vial, seal it up, and send it off. And another few weeks later an email arrives that tells you that your online profile has been completed. Pretty easy, actually.

The confidential (yet privately shareable) report summarizes your genome scan and provides you with a variety of health, traits, and ancestry - complemented by a rich library of background research. My results confirmed simple things like my skin and eye colour, insights into my ancestry on both my mother's and father's side, and indicators about the likelihood that I may go bald or become diabetic, among other things. It offers both the novelty of science and the profundity of extreme self-awareness. Not for everyone, and not especially actionable, but highly interesting for those seeking the ultimate in insider information.

 
Competitive Advantage Is Fleeting (And It's Okay to Admit It). An interesting HBS article by Rita McGrath.

One implication of hypercompetition that has not yet gotten the attention it deserves is that the skill of getting out of things and re-focusing your organization is likely to be just as important as spotting opportunities and moving to capture them. I suggest that the vast majority of companies struggle with letting go, while the more adroit strategists make the necessary judgment calls and move on.

 
Recess was the best, wasn't it? Ah, well, here's a pretty cool program out of New York that seems to be recapturing that fun and exercise for a wider audience: Punk Rope!

Punk Rope Salutes March Madness 3-31-09 from Tim Haft on Vimeo.